Is Samsung’s Galaxy Fold ready for commercialization? Many journalists face defective test copies. The folding screen of the borrowed devices began to show problems after only a few hours of testing.
The question of the protective screen
At the same time, a manager of the operator T-Mobile published the photo of a Samsung warning that users should not remove the default protective screen installed on the smartphone. The problem, the alert message was not present on the boxes sent to journalists.
The other problem is that this screen does not seem to be the complete cause of the failures. While Marques Brownlee, and others, reported that they tried to effectively remove the protective screen, causing the death of the device, Dieter Bohn and some other journalists did not. So there are at least two possible sources for this failure happening so quickly.
Samsung will have to work on the protective screen that is necessary and so easily removable is also a problem.
Broken screen, flickering, and marks
Several types of problems occurred for the testers, leading to a complete failure of the folding screen. Steve Kovach of CNBC released a video showing half of the screen flickering after only one day of use.
Marc Gurman, a journalist for Bloomberg, also encountered problems with the Galaxy Fold after two days of testing. There, more than half of the screen was problematic, and you can see marks appearing on the surface of the screen.
It is also a problem encountered by Dieter Bohn of The Verge, who saw marks quickly appearing on the screen, and Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) also noticed the death of the device.
Samsung is working on the issue
Samsung quickly recovered the defective copies for analysis, offering new copies to the testers, and also issued a press release.
The brand explains that it will analyze the reasons for this failure very precisely, reminding that we must not remove the Galaxy Fold’s protective screen. It also emphasizes the difference between units sent in advance to journalists and the final devices that will be marketed.
It is difficult to guess how widespread this problem will be to the units that will be marketed by Samsung in a few days. The ghost of the Galaxy Notes 7 clearly hovers over an issue that has been so quickly generalized to journalists who have received the phone.
However, it should be kept in mind that the Galaxy Fold is not a smartphone like any other. Samsung is here at the forefront of what is being done in terms of design for a mobile device. The manufacturer has to take responsibility to properly handle any problems that customers may encounter with its after-sales service and to improve product reliability quickly.
